What is this scary technology? Huawei demonstrates Android's new file system EROFS: faster phones

Although the file system sounds a bit obscure, in fact, some common sense users have come into contact with it, especially PC users. For example, when the size of a single file began to exceed 4GB+, FAT32 could not support it due to its inherent limitations, thus pushing the NTFS format into history.

Android relies on Linux, so the main file systems include exFAT, F2FS, ext4, etc. At the launch of Huawei Mate 9, Richard Yu introduced that EMUI 5.0 uses F2FS to replace ext4, which improves the fluency. This F2FS was developed by Samsung, which has made a lot of optimizations for 4K reading and writing of high-speed flash memory.

According to Phoronix/XDA, Huawei engineer Gao Xiang shared a new Linux read-only file system EROFS (Extendable Read-Only File System) in the open source community.

EROFS is only in the early stages of development. Its design goal is different from existing read-only systems in that it uses an improved compression algorithm to ensure space savings while improving performance and speed.

Engineers compared the continuous/random read data of a Linux server and Kirin 970 platform when using EROFS and EXT4 (ext4) file systems to perform compression operations. The server platform's continuous read performance was not very good, but random data always had a very obvious advantage over ext4, with a maximum of more than 500%.

On the Kirin 970 Android platform, EROFS always has a clear advantage in random and sequential data reading.

It is not clear when EROFS will be incorporated into the Linux kernel by Huawei, and it is not known whether it is related to the "scary technology" that Huawei has been promoting recently to increase the speed of mobile phones.